Linda Gasparello

Cities, I Know Them by Their Bread

May 15, 2017 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

By Linda Gasparello

I’ve always associated cities with bread. Boston, south of which I was raised, I associate with oatmeal bread. Washington, D.C., where I spent most of my life, I associate with white bread — the Wonder kind.

New York, where I lived for a few years, I associate with seeded rye bread. If you said “New York” to me, I’d think of the malty, sour taste of the rye flour, the slight licorice flavor of the caraway seeds and the fight my teeth would have with the crust. Seeded rye bread is assertive, like New York.

My husband, Llewellyn King, and I have lived in Rhode Island for nearly five years. But I don’t yet associate a bread with Providence. This is curious because the city abounds with artisan and ethnic bread bakeries, especially Italian and Portuguese.

What’s really curious is that restaurants in Providence and around the state don’t routinely bring you bread at some point between sitting down and getting your food.

Restaurants serve bread for a number of reasons. Here are two: Traditionally, serving bread has been a way to welcome guests; and practically, a basket of bread or a small loaf keeps guests happy before the food arrives.

When the poet Omar Khayyam said ecstatically, “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread – and thou,” he was sitting beneath a bough with his beloved, reading a book of verses. Just think, if the 11th-century lovers were alive today, they’d be sitting in a Persian restaurant (alas, there isn’t one in Providence), reading their menus and eating nan-e barbari, a flatbread with pillowy ridges.

I could associate Providence with a flatbread that is ubiquitous in the city: pizza. Providence is a welcoming city. It’s not a stretch to associate pizza with the share-a-slice-with-us welcome that my husband and I have gotten from the city.

It’s Comedy and a Concert Tonight!

Last October, I was introduced to the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra by a friend who sings with the Providence Singers. Under the superb direction of guest conductor Bramwell Tovey, the orchestra and singers performed Mozart’s “Requiem Mass in D Minor” on Oct. 15.

Before stepping onto the podium, Tovey told the bizarre story of how Mozart got a commission from a court intermediary to write a piece commemorating the death of Count Franz von Walsegg’s young wife, Anna, which the pretentious count could pass off as his own. The musical heavyweight died, at 35, while writing the requiem.

Tovey’s lecture came as a surprise to me. Conductors, in my symphonic concert-going experience, never spoke and carried a small stick. My friend told me that the orchestra’s musical director, Larry Rachleff, loved to talk to the audience: It was his schtick.

For 21 seasons, until his retirement from the orchestra on May 6, Rachleff often gave short lectures before he lifted his baton. He is a noted music educator, and currently holds the Walter Chris Hubert Chair at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music in Houston, where he lives with his wife, mezzo soprano Susan Lorette Dunn, and their young son, Sam.

Rachleff is also a skilled standup comedian, as I found out during his farewell concert on May 6.

The performance of the second piece he chose, Joseph Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne,” was delayed to deal with an offstage problem with the soloist’s – his wife Susan – gown. For about 15 minutes, Rachleff summoned all his comedic talents: He told a story about how his family had encountered a naked woman in a lobby of a hotel in Geneva. When someone walked onstage with his score, he joked, “Usually the librarian hands me the score, but tonight she must be otherwise engaged.”

His adoring audience laughed, and they cried when he took his final bow.

Cry Me a River

“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time,” said Leonardo da Vinci.

For nearly a week, if you dipped your hand into the Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint in West Warwick, R.I., you’d touch mounds of filthy foam and pieces of white styrofoam blocks.

From morning till night, I watched this dreck float down the river, collect on the banks and cascade over the dam. I watched pairs of mallard ducks and flocks of geese wading in the smelly suds trapped in the shrubs on both banks. I watched cardinals and other birds, that usually stop for a bite at my neighbor’s porch feeder, pick at the styrofoam icebergs and carry off pieces, presumably to their nests in the wooded banks.

I took pictures and reported this to Anna Cole, a technical staff assistant at the state’s Department of Environmental Management. She dispatched Robert Fritsche, an environmental scientist the department’s Bureau of Environmental Protection, Office of Compliance and Inspection, with impressive speed.

My husband has praised Rhode Island’s beauty in columns in The Providence Journal, on our television program, “White House Chronicle,” and on Rhode Island Public Radio. Now I praise the government for taking the preservation of that beauty seriously.

Above: Pawtuxet River at Riverpoint in West Warwick, R.I., Photos by Linda Gasparello.

Signs of the Times, Modern and Ancient

April 28, 2017 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

I take the train a lot from Providence, R.I. to Washington, D.C. For a long time, it passes through what people would call the most beautiful scenery of the trip: the Connecticut shoreline. And for a short time, it passes through what they would call the most blighted scenery of the trip: the walls along the railroad tracks between North Philadelphia and 30^th Street Station.

Katharina Grosse, psycholustro.

But I look forward to the beauty in the blight along that stretch of the trip. I’ve seen some of the most stunning artwork on those walls and buildings along the tracks, one commissioned, like contemporary German artist Katharina Grosse’s “psychylustro” — a warehouse with windows that look as though they were blown out in a blaze of orange and white – but most done by anonymous artists. Whether their frenetic art is benign or malign, I don’t care. It transforms my trip.

I work the graffiti on the walls the way people do the difficult crosswords in London’s Sunday Times. There is meaning, sometimes clear, in the words on the walls. On the walls, I read, “ZeroSmyle,” and I sympathize with the graffitist. Skrew, a loud graffitist, spray-painted a message — maybe for China — on a wall, “Drama, Tibet.”

I think about what master graffitist Banksy said in “Wall and Piece” about these artists, “Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.”

Photo: Linda Gasparello.

One person’s defacement is another’s decoration. I’ve enjoyed grafitti on walls or buildings all over the world. Vienna has some of the most magnificent graffiti. I like to take the hydrofoil between Vienna and Bratislava, Slovakia, so that I can see the museum of temporary art along the Danube walls.

While living and traveling in the Middle East, I’ve seen graffiti galore — and one of the best writs on a trip to the Greco-Roman city of Ephesus in Turkey. Carved on a pillar near the city’s brothel – the “Love House,” as it was called by the ancients – a guide said there is some advice to lovers and other strangers: “One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.” Mercury was the ancient treatment for syphilis.

The ancients were always kissing and telling on prostitutes. “Second only to the master of us all, Clodia has become the most discussed person in Rome. Versus of unbounded obscenity are scribbled about her over the walls and pavements of all the baths and urinals in Rome,” Thornton Wilder wrote in his epistolary novel “The Ides of March.”

Now, back to the future. Donald Trump’s presidency has revived the art of the protest sign and placard, not seen since the nation’s hippie days. Gitta Hasing, who I’ve known since she was a child, participated in January’s Women’s March and last week’s March for Science in Washington. She and her husband are biological scientists.

Neither wind nor rain could keep Gitta, her toddler son and her parents from marching on the Mall. She is a talented photographer and took pictures of protesters and their signs in both marches in the same exacting way she photographed parts of North and Central Florida trees for a book, published by the University of Florida.

: Photo: Gitta Hasing

: Photo: Gitta Hasing

: Photo: Gitta Hasing

If Paris is The City of Light, Washington is The City of Sayings. They are carved on government building walls, museum and monument walls, and plazas. The one that always makes me cry is part of the last verse of Walt Whitman’s Civil War-era poem “The Wound-Dresser,” carved in the granite around the Dupont South Metro entrance:

Thus in silence in dreams’ projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad

Photo: Linda Gasparello.

Two days before the March for Science, as I was sitting on a wall at the Watergate, waiting for Gita’s mother to arrive for a performance of Ballet Across America at the Kennedy Center. I looked up at two signs hanging from a street light near the Embassy of Saudi Arabia. The blue sign read “The Kennedy Center, JFKC: A Centennial Celebration of John F. Kennedy” with his picture – his 100^th birthday would have been May 29, 2017. The orange one read, “Courage, Freedom, Justice, Service, Gratitude.”

Trump can’t take those words away from me. They’re carved in my memory and the memories of millions of Americans. And a sign with bold hand lettering, posted on a pillar at Cafe La France in the Providence Amtrak Station, proves that so well:

WE WELCOME

ALL Races

ALL Religions

ALL Countries of Origin

ALL Sexual Orientations

ALL Genders

We Stand With You

You Are Safe Here

March for Science on the Mall — Photos by Gitta Hasing

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The Coptic Crisis: A Story of Benign Neglect by Anwar el-Sadat

April 15, 2017 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

By Linda Gasparello

Forty years ago, I attended Easter Sunday mass at the Church of St. Barbara in Old Cairo, also known as Coptic Cairo, on the east bank of the Nile. I was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo, and this was my first Coptic mass. At it, regrettably, I had a front-row seat to the routine disrespect Coptic Christians suffered in Egypt under President Anwar el-Sadat.

The Church of St. Barbara is a fine example of Coptic architecture with its white plaster walls, marble double-colonnaded nave and timbered roof, carved cedar pews, and rare, gleaming icons. It is one of the most popular in the district, and it quickly filled to capacity.

No sooner had the mass begun, when I heard the sound of firecrackers outside the church. The noise pierced the solemnity of the mass, but the congregation took no notice and prayed on.

During the communion, a man in a suit, accompanied by two other men, marched down the center aisle of the church. The man in the suit was a government official, I was later told. In a symbolic gesture meant to mollify the Copts, who comprised about 10 percent of Egypt’s population, government officials made appearances at churches during Christmas and Easter.

The three men pushed into a pew, sat down and started chatting with each other. The congregation brushed away this disruption of the holiest part of the mass as easily as street flies. A woman sitting behind me muttered, “Ma’alesh.” In Egyptian dialect, she said, “It doesn’t matter.”

The Copts were used to disrespect and, far worse, persecution, which they had suffered since St. Mark founded the Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria around 43 A.D. In fact, the Church of St. Barbara stands on the site of a church dedicated to St. Cyrus and St. John in 684 A.D. that was destroyed during an Arab assault. The story goes that when some Christians from Damanhur, a city about 100 miles northwest of Cairo, including Cyrus and John, confessed to their faith, they were shot with arrows, burned in a furnace, tied to a horse’s tail, dragged through the streets and survived – to be beheaded. One of the church’s chapels contains the remains of St. Cyrus and St. John; another contains relics of St. Barbara, a beauty from the Greek city of Nicomedia, whose pagan father had her tortured before he beheaded her in 306 A.D.

The Copts were being excluded from the “new society” plan that Sadat had highlighted on his trip to Washington, D.C., just a week before Easter. The Egyptian president held his first meeting with President Jimmy Carter on April 3. In his toast at a state dinner on April 4, Sadat said, “Mr. President and dear friends, as you know we are embarking on an ambitious program to rebuild our society along lines which ensure more justice and equal opportunity. We are revitalizing our system with a view to enable it to cope with the immense problems we encounter, old and new. We are determined to build this new society on ideals of faith in human dignity, which we inherited from the ancient Egyptian civilization. This heritage has kept us united together and optimistic in the face of the most difficult of challenges.”

Actually, Sadat’s state was falling apart. It ceded to the religious institutions the provision of education, financial assistance and health services to the public. Sadat, who was a devout Muslim, allowed Islamist groups to flourish in society and on campuses, countering the leftist and Nasserist domination of them. Religion – an emboldened Islamism — was replacing the “Egypt for the Egyptians” nationalism of Nasser as the country’s foundation. There was a rising level of disregard for the Copts, who became increasingly fearful for their future. In 1977, there were clashes between Muslims and Copts in Upper Egypt.

I should have left the Church of St. Barbara with a sense of joy — the mass was beautiful. Instead, I left with one of foreboding: I thought the rise of the Islamists and their disrespect of Copts, condoned by the government, would lead to mass deaths.

And so it did – to Sadat’s death and to hundreds of deaths of Muslims and Copts, including at least 45 in two church bombings by ISIS on Palm Sunday.

Photo: August 11, 2012 Church of St. Barbara, Cairo, Nadia Ismail. Used under the Creative Commons 2.0 Generic License

Argonne National Laboratory Diary

February 16, 2017 by Linda Gasparello 1 Comment

By Linda Gasparello

Where Scientists Sleep

Last week my husband, Llewellyn King, and I abandoned the delights of West Warwick, R.I., to visit Chicago – actually, a part of Chicagoland that few visitors get to see.

Llewellyn was a speaker at a conference held at Argonne National Laboratory, just outside of Chicago. Argonne is the multidisciplinary science and engineering research center, born out of the University of Chicago’s work on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s.

The lab, which occupies 1,500 acres, came as a total surprise for our Uber driver, a Chicago native who used to drive trucks professionally. “I’ve driven past this place many times, but I never knew what was goin’ on,” he said.

We had some difficulty finding Argonne’s Main North Gate and delay getting our ore-arranged passes. Once cleared for entry, we had to drive behind a security vehicle to our hotel: the Argonne Guest House, which is Building 240 on the “campus.” It is where most people stay for conferences, short research visits and invited tours of the site, thus avoiding the main security gate rigamarole.

Our driver thought all this cloak-and-dagger stuff was a hoot, but Llewellyn, who has visited Argonne many times, wasn’t entertained. He wanted his dinner and a glass, or two, of red wine.

The guest house is a fine example of 1970s university dormitory architecture, more Brutalist than humanist. But what the building lacks in design, it more than makes up for in setting: It backs onto some of the Argonne site’s wooded acres.

The lobby and the guest rooms don’t inspire one to linger. But you might want to hang out with colleagues in the elevator lobby on any of the guest floors. Each has comfortable club chairs, equipped with wooden swivel trays and a huge whiteboard hanging on a wall – perfect for a pre-breakfast solving of isotope burn-up equations.

Zen at Work

The Zen garden in the seven-story Theory and Computing Sciences Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

As you drive up to the Theory and Computing Sciences Center on the Argonne site, your heart will beat a little faster: This building – Building 240 — with its jutting, pierced concrete slabs and glass walls, houses state-of-the-art supercomputing systems. You sense from its great, gray exterior that the interior won’t be filled with floors of sensory-deprivation cubbies for techies.

It isn’t. The building, according to the lab, “was designed to be an open and flexible workspace to encourage the free flow of ideas between scientists at Argonne as well as the technology to connect researchers across the globe.” Its seven stories wrap around a Zen garden.

There are cloth-lined cubicles with whiteboards — on some of which I saw scrawled equations. But on the ground floor no glass walls separate them from the garden. Surely, gazing at the garden and ambling around it through the open hall must reduce workers’ stress; unless you’re a worker who is stressed by the thought of a snake curled up in your cubicle.

The garden’s raked, gray gravel sits upon dirt and occasionally critters – frogs, rodents and even garden-variety snakes — break through the garden’s surface and can be found among its plants and rocks.

“We like ’em. They’re engineers,” one ground-floor worker told me.

Behavioral Science

Door sign in the Theory and Computing Sciences Center. Photo: Linda Gasparello.

“Scientists are literal.” That’s how Gilbert Brown, director of the nuclear engineering program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, explained why the Theory and Computing Sciences Center’s bathrooms are called “toilet rooms.”

“The rooms have toilets but no baths,” he said.

Makes sense to me.

When I pointed out to another nuclear engineer that all the push pins on a bulletin board outside the center’s conference room were placed in a rectangle, he said unhesitatingly, “Scientists are neat as pins.”

Doe, Oh, Dear

The white fallow deer herd that has roamed the Argonne site since the lab’s inception in 1946 – and has caused visitors sometimes to speculate on the nature of the experiment that produced their unusual coloring – has dwindled to one doe.

“Prior to 1946, part of the land that is now Argonne was the country estate of Gustav Freund, inventor of ‘skinless’ casings for hot dogs. Freund had a small herd of the deer on his estate for several years. The naturally light-colored species – Dama dama – are native to North Africa, Europe and parts of Asia.

“When the federal government purchased the property, it was believed all of the herd had either been given away to parks and zoos or destroyed by the local game warden. It turned out there still were two does on the property, and one gave birth to a buck. The herd created from these three deer became a fixture on the Argonne property and a topic of interest and conversation for employees and visitors alike,” Donna Jones Pelkie wrote in Argonne Today, a lab publication.

Unfortunately, the white fallow deer didn’t reproduce at a normal rate because of a lack of genetic diversity; even when they do reproduce, they only give birth to one fawn per year – unlike the fecund, native white-tailed deer which also roam the site. The fawns were prey to coyotes, which have become city slinkers.

Efforts to preserve or replenish this historic herd were stymied by state regulations, which not only would’ve required any new white fallow deer brought onto the site to be deemed “livestock,” but also would’ve made Argonne responsible for the herd’s maintenance, including penning, feeding and veterinary care.

So the lab opted for natural attrition, which comports with “its thinking of keeping natural areas in balance with the native ecosystem,” according to the Jones Pelkie story.

Ireland Diary: Dublin and Kilkenny

December 1, 2016 by Linda Gasparello 1 Comment

By Linda Gasparello

“But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.” — James Joyce, “Dubliners”

Ireland is always an adventure.

My husband, Llewellyn King, and I have traveled there frequently since the early 1980s. Our first trip, on which we drove with friends from Dublin to Dingle, gave us some of our most memorable impressions of the country.

Nearly every summer from 1989-2010, we traveled to Ballina, Co. Mayo, in the west of Ireland, to participate in the Humbert Summer School (named after one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean Joseph Amable Humbert), founded by journalist John Cooney for “the study of Ireland and Europe.” It was a Brigadoon-like event, attracting academics, politicians, musicians, writers and many faithful regulars – who Cooney called “Hubertians” — from all over Ireland and abroad.

The school’s sessions took place in many Mayo venues, from Moyne College and Murphy Brothers Bar & Restaurant in Ballina to the Golden Acres pub in Kilalla and Bessie’s Bar in Kilcummin — a beachead on the county’s northern coast, where a French expedition commanded by Gen. Humbert landed on Aug. 22, 1798, in an attempt to assist Irish rebels during the 1798 Rebellion.

During those summers Humbertians did a lot of thinking, heightened by a lot of drinking.

Shortly before the election, Llewellyn and I traveled to Ireland to attend the Association of European Journalists’ (AEJ) annual meeting, held in Kilkenny this year. The association skirts the high cost of holding meetings in Europe’s big cities by holding their annual in small ones, like Maastricht, Netherlands, Burgenland, Austria and Sibiu, Romania.

In addition to its serious purpose, the AEJ annual meeting has much of the fun and good fellowship as did the Humbert School. A few of its members were also Humbert regulars, including our friends David Haworth, who lives in Brussels and writes for The Irish Daily Mail, and Joe Carroll, who covered Washington and the Clinton White House for The Irish Times.

“There’s no friends like the old friends,” Joyce also wrote in “Dubliners.”

Two Celebrations in Dublin

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The 12th-century Kilkenny Castle from the porch of the Rivercourt Hotel. Photo/Linda Gasparello

Christmas is nearing in Ireland. The shops on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, the city’s main thoroughfare — and one of the widest in Europe — are brimming with decorations and merchandise. But even as the Irish start celebrating the holidays, they have not yet finished celebrating the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which set Ireland on the path to its independence in 1922.

The holiday light vines on the lamp posts in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street illuminate banners that say, “Dublin Remembers 1916.” Walk down the street to Eason and you’ll see the bookstore’s front display tables laden with 1916-23 histories, from Fearghal McGarry’s “The Rising Ireland: Easter 1916 to Tim Pat Coogan’s “DeValera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow.”

Abeba, an Ethopian woman visiting Dublin, leafed through Sinead McCoole’s “Easter Widows: Seven Irish Women Who Lived in the Shadow of the 1916 Rising.” She told me, “ I took the 1916 bus tour. Now I want to read about women of the time.”

She had taken Dublin Bus’s “The 1916 Tour — Beyond Barricades,” in which on-board actors and film immerse passengers in the rebellion. “Dublin was in flames, and you really felt like you were there,” Abeba said.

The previous day, a bank holiday, my husband and I had taken the hop-on-hop-off bus tour. One loop included Kilmainham Jail, where the seven signatories to the declaration of The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic were executed from May 3-12, 1916.

Our driver told us that he had named his daughter Grace, after Grace Gifford, a gifted artist and cartoonist who was active in the Republican movement. Gifford married her fiance Joseph Mary Plunkett in the jail’s chapel only a few hours before he was executed for being a leader of the rebellion.

As we neared the jail, our driver sang a refrain from “Grace,” often sung by the late Jim McCann of The Dubliners folk band fame:

Oh, Grace just hold me in your arms, and let this moment linger,
They take me out at dawn and I will die.
With all my love I place this wedding ring upon your finger,
There won’t be time to share our love, so we must say good-bye.

Our driver told us that Kilmainham is a very busy site, and prebooking tickets is essential, especially during this centenary year. However, he said, there is easy access to the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, where our tour ended and where the Rising began.

“It came under heavy bombardment for a week. You can still see the bullet holes on the pillars and walls. Gutted by fire, it did not reopen until 1929,” he said.

The Rising began on April 24, 1916, and lasted six days. Early Easter Monday, 1,200 members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, under the command of Patrick Pearse, a Gaelic scholar, schoolteacher and poet, and James Connolly, founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, with others seized the General Post Office on Sackville Street (now called O’Connell). On the building’s front steps, Pearse read the declaration, addressed to “The People of Ireland” and signed by himself, Connolly, Plunkett and four others.

Almost 500 people were killed in the Rising, more than half were civilians. More than 2,600 were wounded during heavy British machine-gun fire, shelling and fires that left parts of inner city Dublin in ruins.

Ireland got its independence from Britain in 1922, amid much strife and bloodshed. But the Irish state has retained close ties with Britain and is the only European Union country that it shares a border with.

It is sad and ironic that Ireland is not only celebrating the start of the British exit from their country in 1916, but it is also concerned about the start of the British exit from the EU – Brexit — next year.

Kilkenny’s ‘Medieval Mile’

If you’ve ever been daunted by a walking tour of a medieval European city, say Prague, then Kilkenny’s “Medieval Mile” will delight you.

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The Black Abbey, founded in 1225 and named after the Dominican order of monks, known for their black capes. Photo/Linda Gasparello

“Good goods sometimes come in small parcels,” Colette Byrne, CEO of the Kilkenny County Council, told the Association of European Journalists.

Just a mile-long, circular walk in Kilkenny (Ireland’s capital in the Middle Ages), Byrne said, will take you past a number of its marvels, including the 13th-century St. Mary’s Church, whose graveyard has a rare and significant collection of tombs, and The Black Abbey, founded in 1225 by William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, for the Dominican order of monks, known for their black capes. The abbey is famous for its five-gabled, stained glass Rosary Window.

Along the mile, there are plenty of non-medieval buildings, notably the limestone Thosel Town Hall which dominates the High Street. Its name comes from two old English words “toll” meaning tax, and “sael” meaning hall. Built in 1761, it served as a custom house and guildhall – today, it’s where Kilkennians pay their taxes.

Across the street from the town hall, there is the Hole in the Wall: a tiny tavern in the inner house of a Tudor mansion built in 1582, and Ireland’s oldest surviving townhouse. Around 1660, in order to gain access from the High Street to the rear of the inner house, a hole was punctured in a wall.

“It was a favored haunt of Captain Arthur Wesley, who was stationed at Kilkenny barracks before being seconded to the British army in Spain and India, and eventually becoming the Duke of Wellington and British prime minister. Later it developed a reputation of ill renown due to duels, arguments, highwaymen, etc., and this led to its eventual demise,” a Hole in the Wall brochure says.

Standing in front of a pair of ghoulish murals, a visitor asks a local woman for directions to the High Street. Photo/Linda Gasparello

On St. Kiernan Street, behind the High Street on the circular walk, there is an inn with a notorious past: Kyteler’s. Ireland’s only witch trials took place in Kilkenny in 1324 – supposedly, they were Europe’s first witchcraft trials. Dame Alice Kyteler, an innkeeper and moneylender, was accused of using poison and sorcery against her four husbands, having amassed a fortune from them. Before she could be tried, Alice pulled strings and fled to England, but her maid was flogged and burned at the stake.

Down the street from Kyteler’s, there is long mural, commissioned by the Keep Kilkenny Beautiful Committee in 2013, with ghoulish images: ghosts, black cats with bared teeth, and a warning that “witches are amongst us.” Behind it, another is in the works: a blue-faced woman in a white dress, lying on her back, either asleep or dead. This mural seems to float above the one in front of it.

Kilkenny is a haven for muralists. Cast your eyes up on the High Street, and you’ll see a cheery pink wall of the Smithwick’s Brewery. Cast them down, on a corner of Friary Street, and you’ll see a black cat with a curled tail, waiting to cross your path.

On all our trips to Ireland over the years, Llewellyn and I don’t know how we missed this magical little city.

→ See more photos from Kilkenny in our photo gallery here.

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A man pushes a stroller down the High Street, as a painted black cat waits to cross their path on the corner. Photo/Linda Gasparello

‘American’ Middle East Universities in Danger

September 1, 2016 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

By Linda Gasparello

The attack on the American University of Kabul opens a new chapter on impeding access to liberal education in Afghanistan. It is a chapter that could be opened in as many as 18 American universities across the Middle East and North Africa.

The American University, located on five acres in the Afghan capital, opened in 2006. It is the only private, not-for-profit and co-educational university in the war-devastated country. It offers its 1,700 full- and part-time students a liberal arts and sciences curriculum taught in English. Many receive U.S. government-funded scholarships.

In 2008 then-first lady Laura Bush — who made access to education in Afghanistan one of her causes — helped to secure $42 million in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development for the American University. The State Department reportedly considers it to be an important symbol of the partnership between the United States and Afghanistan, and it has educated many Afghan government and non-government group officials who are trying to build a modern country.

Other American universities in the Middle East and North Africa – between nine and 18 – that receive U.S. government support also promote critical thinking and a liberal arts and sciences curriculum. The oldest of these, the American University in Beirut, has been doing so since its founding by American missionaries in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College. Its mission statement says, “The university believes deeply in and encourages freedom of thought and expression and seeks to foster tolerance and respect for diversity and dialogue.”

As Michelle Evans, student life coordinator at the American University in Cairo (AUC), the second-oldest American-brand institution in the Middle East, told U.S. News & World Report, “The mission and values of an American university is to cultivate a well-rounded, independent thinker who is ready for the challenges of the world.”

As a graduate student on a U.S. government-funded scholarship to AUC in the late 1970s, I saw how important it was to have such an institution in a country that was trying to modernize. AUC students were exposed to so many more courses and ideas than students at the national universities, including Cairo University, who took classes only within their discipline. I felt they would be the most ready and able to carry out the “opening up” (or infitah) to the West that President Anwar Sadat was beginning in 1977.

Remarkably, as strongholds of Western education and values, AUC and other universities did not suffer lethal attacks during the civil wars in Lebanon, Arab anger at President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or the Arab Spring. But there have been attacks on them, and I experienced one at AUC in 1977.

On a January afternoon, I was enjoying coffee with friends in the interior garden of the university when we heard a faculty member shout,“There’s a riot outside. Go home! Go home now!” Rioters pelted the university with stones, breaking windows. The stoning stunned everyone because the university — and America — was held in such high esteem in Egypt. The school’s librarian, a well-born Egyptian matron, said to me, “Who would do such a thing?”

We soon learned just who.

Thousands of poor Egyptians took to the streets in anger over Sadat’s economic liberalization, specifically a government decree lifting price controls on bread and other basic necessities, acceding to an International Monetary Fund request. The countrywide Bread Riots lasted for two days, and rioters destroyed 120 buses and hundreds of buildings in Cairo alone. But the American University was spared.

The Bread Riot protesters threw rocks; today’s Islamists, motivated by ideology, will toss bombs.

The attack on the American University of Kabul was a seminal event. Now the venerated American universities in the Middle East and North Africa will be even more vulnerable than they already are. — For InsideSources

For Lutetia

November 16, 2015 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

Fluctuat nec mergitur

O Lutetia, you’ve seen these seas before;

Seas roiling, and red with blood.

Raise your head now bowed in sorrow. Look up!

Montmartre: the Mons Martyrum,

Where gore and gaiety have embraced in a danse macabre

For centuries. During the siege, did you despair, Clovis?

Or you, Henri? Wasn’t the city well worth a Mass?

Terror has rained down on you. You’ve emerged confident.

Liberté, Liberté cherie

Tonight your proud tower is dark.

You are tossed but not sunk.

— Linda Gasparello

Vietnam Diary: Ho Chi Minh City

September 24, 2015 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

By Linda Gasparello

In Ho Chi Minh City, the steeples of Notre Dame Cathedral and other French colonial-period churches no longer dominate the skyline. Tower cranes are everywhere as scores of high-rise buildings are going up in this city of 8 million, which is widely still called Saigon.

This city is a hive for the young – 60 percent of Vietnam’s population is under 30, and 85 percent is under 40. Educational attainment is rising fast. In Ho Chi Minh City, there are more than 80 universities.

“Young Vietnamese are eager to learn,” said Duc Anh, one of the city’s young entrepreneurs. And earn.

Wearing shiny helmets, cowl scarves pulled up to their noses, jackets and gloves, young Vietnamese swarm the streets on their motorbikes.

Mobile Mom. A young mother, with a rattan high chair perched on her motor scooter, waits on tiptoes.

Mobile Mom. A mother, with a rattan high chair perched on her motor scooter, waits on tiptoes.

Those with dash and cash head, for example, to the Vincom Center, a twin-towered, glassy mega mall in District 1, the city’s center. They hang out in the district’s burgeoning home-grown coffee chains with European-cafe (the French introduced coffee to Vietnam in 1857) ambiance, including Phuc Long Coffee and Startup Coffee. And they club the night away.

But modernization hasn’t come to all of the city’s 24 districts (19 urban and five rural) at a high-octane rate. Traditional culture is parked everywhere from the streets lined with shops carrying just one type of product, to the pungent food stalls in the Binh Tay Market in Cholon, the city’s huge Chinatown, to The Jade Emperor Pagoda, a multi-faith temple, built by the Cantonese in 1909, where turtles swim in the fetid courtyard pools and people pray in a fog of incense smoke.

Sacred swimmers. Hundreds of turtles swim in a pool at The Jade Emperor Pagoda.

This diary will meander from Ho Chi Minh City to Nha Trang, a buzzy seaside town, also the capital of Khanh Hoa Province, on the south central coast of Vietnam.

Landmark Meeting

In July, I traveled to Vietnam with my husband, Llewellyn King. It was our second trip to the country in six months, and in a year that marks two important anniversaries: the 40^th of the end of the war with the United States, and the 20^th of the normalization of diplomatic relations.

During our trip, a milestone in Vietnam-U.S. relations was in the making: Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Vietnam Communist Party, met with President Obama at the White House.

“As you heard, I got an invitation to Vietnam. And I think this is indicative of the remarkable progress that’s taken place in the relationship between our two countries over the last 20 years,” Obama told reporters in the Oval Office, following his meeting with Trong on July 7.

“Twenty years is a long period of one’s lifetime. Yet, it is merely a fleeting moment in the long history of relations between nations,” Pham Binh Minh, deputy prime minister and foreign minister, wrote for a news site of the state-run Vietnam News Agency. “Few people could have imagined that Vietnam and the United States would make such great strides in their bilateral ties after two decades of normalized relations.”

Since May 2014, when a fierce fight over sovereignty broke out between communist neighbors Vietnam and China, causing relations to plummet to their worst level in three decades, those strides have become more vigorous in defense. In October that year, the United States decided to partially lift its ban on lethal weapons sales to Vietnam. And three months ago, the two countries announced a Joint Vision Statement to increase defense ties, bolstering the comprehensive political and strategic partnership established in 2013.

Trade between the Vietnam and the United States has grown by leaps and bounds. “From a modest figure of $400 million in 1994, bilateral trade has increased 90-fold to $36.3 billion in 2014. With $30.6 billion in exports to the United States in 2014, Vietnam became ASEAN’s No. 1 exporter to the U.S. market: Vietnam even surpassed India and joined the list of top 10 net exporters to the world’s largest consumer market,” Minh wrote in his July 7 article.

Currently, the United States is the sixth-largest investor in Vietnam, with direct investment of $7 billion, reaching $9 billion with the addition of investment via a third country. In two or three years, the United States will become the top investor in Vietnam, a place now held by South Korea, predicts Matthew Daley, chairman of the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council. In early May, the council sponsored a group of 23 U.S. businesses on a visit to Vietnam – the largest-ever U.S. business group trip to the country.

It won’t be long before the “Made in China” labels in your clothes and other products will be replaced with “Made in Vietnam” labels. Not long at all: the Chico’s brand sweater I’m wearing has that label.

Crisp Currency

The Vietnamese don’t like creased or crumpled currency. I found this out when I tried to change a $20 bill at the Pullman Saigon Centre, a five-star hotel, in Ho Chi Minh City.

I handed Giang, a front desk clerk, a neatly folded $20 bill, and asked her to exchange it for dong. She handed it right back to me with two hands, saying, “We cannot change it; only new bills. It is a law since 2006.”

By new, she meant hot off the U.S. Mint presses. “Money is money; crisp or crumpled,” I protested.

“No,” she said, “In Vietnam it is not. And so many visitors here are sad when I cannot change their money.” And mad, too, I thought.

I’m not sure there is such a law, but there is a tradition of crisp currency in Vietnam.

“In general people prefer notes to be shiny, new, crisp and unfolded. Traditionally money is given in the New Year, at weddings and other family occasions. Fresh, new notes are considered ‘lucky,’ while grubby, crumpled, soggy notes are very much frowned upon,” according to Jonny Platt, a Briton who has lived a decade in Ho Chi Minh City and writes the Vietnam Travel blog.

“When paying for goods or services, it is polite to straighten the notes and to hand them to a vendor with two hands, making eye contact as you do so,” Platt advises in his blog.

Sweet Thy

When in Ho Chi Minh City, get a guide. That’s my advice.

Mind you, as a lifelong traveler, I love meandering in a city. But when I’ve toured a city with a good guide, it’s really paid off.

Hiring one can be a crapshoot, but my husband and I lucked out twice in this buzzy southern city.

We took two city tours, morning and afternoon, offered by Saigontourist, a state-owned holding company with investments in the hospitality (including the Pullman) and tourism industries. Small and medium-sized, independent tour operators are cropping up, but they’re up against a government giant: I was told, for example, that Saigontourist is one of two companies allowed to provide tours to the cruise ships making calls in Vietnam’s southern ports, which are becoming industry hot spots.

Both guides may have been government employees, but they were anything but dull, especially our afternoon guide, Anh Thy. Indeed, the booking agent said, “You were very lucky. She was a history teacher. She is famous in Saigon.”

During our four-hour tour with Miss Thy (pronounced “tea”), we learned that she was a gifted anthropologist and comedian. Our tour included a visit to the Ben Thanh market; The Jade Emperor Pagoda; the Reunification Palace; and a cyclo ride in Cholon, the Chinatown that dominates the western part of the city.

On one street, Miss Thy pointed out a Fruit Shake shop that sells nuoc ma, sugar cane juice. “We like that drink. So sweet, you don’t have to sweeten it,” she said, adding, “Sugar-cane juice in Fruit Shake with many flavors becomes a high-class beverage in Vietnam.” It’s also a refreshing drink sold all over the country in lowlier stalls and carts.

Miss Thy gave us this food and beverage rule of thumb: Hanoi, located in the North, hot and salty; Hue, in the central part of the country, hot and spicy; Saigon, cold and sweet.

As for coffee, Vietnam is the world’s largest producer of Robusta coffee, a bean variety that coffee experts consider inferior to the Arabica type. But the Vietnamese don’t give a hill of ’em about that, and brewed Robusta is a top drink thanks to Vietnamese ingenuity, which you’ll see everywhere from their agricultural practices to exquisite handicrafts to major engineering projects, to the way millions of motorcyclists know where to buy gas in Saigon, where there are few gas stations — Hint: Look for an upturned brick on a sidewalk, and you’ll find a man with a gas can.

In Ho Chi Minh City and elsewhere in Vietnam, coffee is prepared using a small, metal drip filter. “In the South, we like our coffee cold and sweet with [condensed] milk.” If you crave an Americano or a cappuccino, you can order one at the proliferating European-style coffee shops, like the local My Life Coffee, or the Australian chain, Gloria Jean’s. And they often come – thanks to Vietnam’s French colonial past and current culinary trends – a macaron.

French twist. Coffee is served at the Pullman Saigon Centre Hotel with a macaron.

Another one of Miss Thy’s food and beverage rules of thumb: “We drink coffee in Saigon; in Hue, they drink coffee and tea; and in Hanoi, they drink tea, like the Chinese.”

ISIS Is Turning the Cradle of Civilization into a Grave

March 17, 2015 by Linda Gasparello 1 Comment

There is horror in the recent news that the Islamic State bulldozed the ruins of two of the greatest Assyrian cities, Nimrud and Nineveh. And there is irony. These ancient cities, located in what is now northern Iraq, were built by a ferocious people whose profession was war – people for whom the Hebrew prophets, including Isaiah, Nahum, Zechariah and Zephaniah, reserved some of their fiercest denunciations.

In the 9^th century B.C., Assurnasirpal II, a brutal militarist, erased entire nations as far as the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, stretching through what is now Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel. But he restored the ancient city of Nimrud and established his capital there. His magnificent Northwest Palace, first excavated by the British explorer Austen Henry Layard in the 1840s, was probably completed between 865 and 869 B.C. Its dedication was celebrated with a banquet for 70,000 guests.

Sennacherib, who moved the capital to Nineveh in 704 B.C., was as bellicose as his forefathers. When the city of Babylon rebelled against his despotic rule, Shennecherib destroyed it, saying, “ The city and its houses, from its foundation to its top, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire. The wall and outer wall, temples and gods, temple towers of brick and earth, as many as there were, I razed and dumped them into the Arahtu canal.” But in Nineveh, he built a palace decorated with precious metals, alabaster and woods. Mountain streams were diverted to provide water for the city’s parks and gardens, resplendent with trees and flowers imported from other lands – along with captives who were enslaved and brought back to Assyria to build and tend them.

It is a wonder that these Assyrian kings who were capable of such ruthlessness were also capable of building cities filled with such majestic architecture.

In the 1970s and 1980s, in the time of another ruthless leader, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi antiquities board reconstructed large parts of Assurnasirpal II’s palace, including the restoration and re-installation of the carved-stone reliefs lining the walls of many rooms, according to Augusta McMahon, professor in the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge.

“The winged bulls that guard the entrances to the most important rooms and courtyards were re-erected. The winged bull statues are among the most dramatic and easily recognized symbols of the Assyrian world,” McMahon wrote in a BBC report.

Nimrud, she added, “provided a rare opportunity for visitors to experience the buildings’ scale and beauty in a way that is impossible to find in a museum context.”

That is lost for all of us, now and in future generations.

Fortunately, a significant number architectural artifacts from Nimrud and Nineveh are housed safely in museums in Europe and North America, including the limestone and alabaster reliefs, portraying Assurnasirpal II surrounded by winged demons, or hunting lions or waging war, and the monumental, human-headed winged lions that guarded important palace doorways, currently displayed in the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

As if the loss of Nimrud and Nineveh were not horrible enough for world heritage, ISIS continued its campaign to eradicate ancient sites it says promote apostasy last week by leveling the ruined city of Hatra, also located in northern Iraq, founded in the days of the Parthian Empire over 2,000 years ago. Hatra’s massive walls withstood attacks by the Romans.

Irina Bolkova, director-general of UNESCO, said, “The destruction of Hatra marks a turning point in the appalling strategy of cultural cleansing underway in Iraq.”

I hope it does. And I hope that what Zephaniah prophesized for Assyria will befall the Islamic State: “Assyria will be made a desolation.” –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Hanoi Diary

March 12, 2015 by Linda Gasparello 1 Comment

Making your way through the traffic in Hanoi, whether by foot, bike, motorbike or automobile, is like playing the game of pick-up sticks.

In the game, a bundle of 50 sticks is released on a tabletop. Each player in turn tries to pick up a stick from the jumbled pile without disturbing any of the others. It is a mentally and physically challenging game.

When the pile is gone, the player with the most sticks wins. Like a pick-up sticks player, a pedestrian, bicyclist or motorist becomes a winner when they have picked a path unharmed through Hanoi‘s traffic tangle.

During my December visit, I saw few traffic accidents in the city. Considering the millions of motorbikes (often ridden by a mother with an infant sitting on her lap and a child clinging to her back, or a deliveryman obscured by his cargo) that cross paths with those of cars, buses, trucks, people pulling handcarts, bicycles and pedestrians, that is a miracle. Or, maybe, it is just common courtesy.

Speaking of tangles, I have never seen anything quite like the mess of overhead power lines, telephone and television cables in Hanoi. The wires, all twisted together and hanging from poles or banyan trees, look like mad dreadlocked hair.

These wires are an eyesore and a huge public hazard.

In June 2013, the English-language daily Viet Nam News reported, Nguyen Thi Nga, a resident in Hai Ba Trung District’s Lang Yen Street, received an electric shock while opening her shop door near an electric pole after heavy rain. Even though uninjured, she has a panic attack when she thinks of it.

“ ‘The whole area is covered with messy and dangerous wires, and they threaten local lives when it rains,” said Nga, adding that after big rains last year, electric discharges damaged many appliances in nearby homes.”

Electric poles holding hundreds of heavy, tangled wires particularly threaten residents in the capital city’s old tenement houses. A group of tenement houses at 30 Pham Van Dong Street is an example, Viet Nam News reported. “Many loose wires hang down from power poles and some even touch the heads of passers-by.

“ ‘Wires even hang down near the public playground, which threatens out children’s safety, said Dam Thi Diu, a 33-year-old resident in Tu Liem District, adding that promises to clean up the problem had been made many times.”

Vu Quoc Hung, deputy director of the Ha Noi Power Corporation, told Viet Nam News that “Hanoi will try its best to have the cables buried on 321 city streets by 2015.” That effort is now coming down to the wire.

The Red River runs through North Vietnam and its folk theater, which includes Cheo and water puppetry.

Dating back to the 11^th century, water puppetry was created by Red River Delta rice farmers who built simple stages on the surfaces of ponds and paddy fields. The shows were supposed to entertain the villagers and the spirits, so that they wouldn’t make mischief.

Nowadays, water puppetry is performed at the Thang Long Water Puppet Theater in Hanoi. After entering the theater, you walk up a narrow, wooden staircase to a first-floor landing. Wooden puppets, laquered white — and some around 30 pounds — are piled on the floor.

The puppets perform in a big pool of water; they enter the water stage through a curtain strung behind it. They are controlled through a pole-and-string rig, hidden beneath the water surface, by eight puppeteers standing in waist-deep water behind the stage.

Musicians, sitting on one side of the pool, provide music and sound effects on traditional Vietnamese instruments. They also do the puppets’ voices.

The night I went to the Thang Long theater, the program included a folk music opening, followed by a 14-scene water puppet performance portraying rural life (planting rice, fishing, chasing the fox that tries to catch ducks); sacred animals (dragon, unicorn, tortoise and phoenix danse); and national history (Le Loi, a 15^th-century hero, returning a sword to Kim Quy, the Golden Tortoise God, on a lake in Hanoi).

The puppets, either vividly lit or shrouded in fog, moved on the water stage like ballet dancers, twirling, diving and swooping in intricate patterns. At the end of the performance, the puppeteers emerged from the water to take a dripping bow.

Water puppetry is a preserved art form. “The secret of how water puppet shows work has been kept quiet for centuries. The puppeteers even have their own dialect and codewords to prevent someone from overhearing talk of a particular technique,” according to the Thang Long theater.

“Trying to figure out exactly how puppeteers can control the intricate movements blindly is part of the magic of each water puppet show. Great shows of skill include passing objects from puppet to puppet and other coordinated movements, which have to be done by instinct rather than sight. The musicians, who can see the puppets, sometimes shout code words to warn the puppeteers when a puppet is not where it should be.”

The performance I saw delighted children, adults – and, not doubt, spirits with mischief on their minds.

China has its Peking Opera. Japan has its Noh Opera. Vietnam has its Hat Cheo theater. Tales of life in North Vietnam’s Red River Delta are told through musicals at the Cheo theater, Nha Hat Cheo Vietnam, in Hanoi.

This form of musical theater (“hat” means “to sing”) satirizes social classes in North Vietnam, from farmers, monks and students to wealthy people, dates back to around the 11^thcentury. Until the 16^th century, these musical tales were performed by traveling, amateur troupes in village squares and building courtyards. Today, they are performed by professionals at Nha Hat Cheo Vietnam, a theater in Hanoi.

Hat Cheo has little in the way of scenery, costumes and makeup. The accompanying orchestra comprises drums, bamboo flutes, fiddles, lutes and zithers.

Every Friday and Saturday night at 8 p.m., the Hanoi theater offers a top-of-the-pops program, titled “5 Most Favored Lyrics of Cheo Art Music.” The program is “a new and innovative approach to introducing audiences to the traditional Cheo art,” according to the theater.

There’s no place like Hang Ma Street for the holidays – any seasonal holiday, from traditional Vietnamese to Christmas.

Christmas is celebrated in Vietnam, and widely across Asia, as a major shopping holiday. And in December, Hang Ma shops were brimming with yuletide treasures: synthetic Christmas trees leaning against front windows; Santa Claus suits and hats in all sizes, from baby to daddy, hanging from rafters; ornaments, tinsel and wrapping paper crowding shelves; and glitter banners reading “Merry Christmas” adorning entrances.

: The legendary white horse of Hanoi.

Instead of a full-length musical, the program includes pieces played by the Cheo orchestra and individual members. One piece, titled “Ways To Pass the Hardship and Sorrows,” is played on a bau, a one-stringed zither which makes a soulful sound. Another piece, titled “Xuy Van Sharing Her Sad Mood and Broken Heart,” is played on a bamboo flute.

The program closes with the orchestra playing “Fate of a Bad Luck Lady,” a piece with a decidedly downbeat title. After hearing it, audiences may wonder whether to give the musicians a standing O, or a standing Oh dear!

*****

On the road from Hanoi to Halong Bay, you’ll see mile after mile of industry. In fact, almost no stretch of the 100-mile-long, main highway is without some form of industry, from single human to heavy.

Just across the Red River, on the outskirts of Hanoi, I saw workers with bodies shaped like question marks tending rice fields. An hour away, I saw mountains with red gashes from clay mining; a nearby village had bricks and clay pottery stacked high in front of shops. Passing through another village, I saw garage-like shops displaying elaborately carved, wooden furniture – massive bed headboards, dining sets and sofas fit for the palaces of ancient kings, or the new Vietnamese McMansions.

Nearing Halong Bay, there is a dreary stretch of highway. The road and villages are covered in soot. “This is a coal-mining area,” my guide, Tran Huong, said. I didn’t need to be told.

: The Old City temple courtyard, strung with birdcages.

Between these villages, I saw all sorts of highway vendors: women in triangular straw hats, selling fruit and vegetables, squatting on the side of the road, their toes within inches of bicyclists and speeding vehicles; men keeping a nonchalant eye on black sandals and shoes, displayed in rows, looking like dashed lines along the highway.

The industry of the Vietnamese is one of the country’s wonders.